Our membership is too bloated, too riddled with voters who do not take
the process seriously enough to educate themselves properly . . . Virtually every voter I know is honored to participate in the process.
Virtually every voter I know considers the ballot a tremendous
responsibility. It’s the voters I don’t know — the ones I never see at
ballparks — who worry me. I fear that some do not give the candidates
the consideration they deserve.

The BBWAA has done a fine job in
recent years of adding Web-based writers, including several whose work
is strongly influenced by sabermetrics. The next step is to go the
other way, trim the fat from the membership, purge those who do not
study the game closely enough to warrant Hall of Fame votes.

The other day I was talking to someone about my “the BBWAA should be ashamed of itself” talk. His response was that it was a bit harsh for me to paint with such a wide bush because, after all, most writers did vote for Blyleven and most did vote for Alomar. My response: you’re right, you can’t tar all the writers. But you can do is tar the organization collectively due to the fact that the electorate is simply too bloated and way too many votes are cast by people who don’t know what the hell they’re doing.

I’m glad to see that Ken Rosenthal (and Pete Abraham and other working baseball writers) feels the same way. As Rosenthal notes, you have a lot of editors and assistant editors who get a vote, most of whom don’t have watching, researching and/or writing about baseball anywhere in their job description. There is at least one political cartoonist in there. It’s a cast of hundreds too many.

The BBWAA has managed to get the postseason awards pretty close to perfect the past couple of years using an electorate of people who actually watch and write a lot about baseball. That’s probably too small a pool to handle something as large as Hall of Fame voting, but I’m thinking that the ideal voting group should be a lot closer in size and expertise to the awards voters than it is to the current anyone-who-once-arguably-wrote-about-baseball-and-is-not-yet-dead crowd.

UPDATE: Buster goes one better: After noting that there’s an inherent conflict of interest involved in writers voting in the first place, he argues the writers shouldn’t vote at all. Make the Hall of Fame come up with their own committee since it’s their thing anyway.

The Oakland Athletics ballpark saga has dragged on for years and years and years. They’ve considered San Jose, Fremont and at least three locations in Oakland as potential new ballpark sites. The whole process has lasted almost as long as the Braves and Rangers played in their old parks before building new ones.

In the past several months the Athletics’ “stay in Oakland” plan has gained momentum. At one point the club thought it had an agreement to build a new place near Peralta/Laney College in downtown Oakland. There have been hiccups with that, so two other sites — Howard Terminal, favored by city officials — and the current Oakland Coliseum site have remained in play. There are pros and cons to each of these sites, as we have discussed in the past.

One consideration not mentioned before was mentioned by team president David Kaval yesterday: sea level rise due to climate change. From the San Francisco Chronicle:

Kaval mentioned twice that the Howard Terminal site would have to take into account sea-level rise and transportation concerns — and he said there have been conversations with the city and county and the Joint Powers Authority about developing the Coliseum site.

The Howard Terminal/Jack London Square area of Oakland has been identified as susceptible to dramatically increased flooding as a result of projected sea level rise due to climate change. On the other side of the bay both the San Francisco Giants and Golden State Warriors have had to consider sea level rise in their stadium/arena development plans. Now it’s the Athletics’ turn.

Fifteen of Major League Baseball’s 30 teams play in coastal areas and another five of them play near the Great Lakes. While some of our politicians don’t seem terribly concerned about it all, people and organizations who will have skin the game 10, 20 and 50 years from now, like the Oakland Athletics, are taking it into account.